28 Hearts of Sand

by Jane Haddam

  FIVE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had finally made up his mind about what he had to do next at about midnight. He started by putting in a call to Juan to pick him up at six o’clock in the morning. That much English, Juan seemed to understand. Then Gregor had looked up the address he wanted and gone in search of Darlee Corn and a printer.

  As it turned out, Darlee Corn did have a printer, although she made it clear that she didn’t usually make it available to guests.

  Gregor took two copies of what he would need in the morning and headed off to bed. He set his alarm clock for four. He packed his attaché case with everything he could imagine he might need. Then he went to bed and tried to sleep against the drumming insistence in his mind that everybody who was ever involved in this case had been something worse than idiotic.

  He got up at four o’clock in the morning and showered and shaved. He found the best suit Bennis had ever given him, then went down to the front door to wait for Juan. Darlee Corn was up and about, but nobody else seemed to be. The large dining room was empty, although hot serving stations were set up on a long table at the side. He grabbed a coffee in a paper cup.

  Juan parked the car at the curb. Gregor got into it and handed over one copy of the detailed directions he had pulled off Google.

  Juan took his time getting through Alwych, so that by the time they reached I-95 it was full-on rush hour, but he followed the directions he’d been given right to the quarter mile. Gregor began to relax. Somewhere around Greenwich, he decided he could stop monitoring their progress. He opened his attaché case and began going over what he had.

  It was useless to tell himself that he had no more information than anybody else had had in all these years. The issue was never what you had, but how you interpreted it. He had gone over and over everything in everybody’s set of notes, and he had ended with Sherlock Holmes. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.

  Gregor knew where Chapin Waring had been, and who had helped her stay out of sight, because there was only one possible answer. There was only one person who would have run interference for her all those years, and there was only one person who would have gone back to the house on Beach Drive after she was dead and let the security alarm ring.

  They got to a neighborhood of row houses, each one of them two stories tall. The place reminded Gregor of the old Archie Bunker television show, except that the population was obviously neither white nor working class. It might be actually African, rather than African-American. It might be Caribbean. The people on the street looked relaxed and pleased with themselves. The corner markets were full of brightly colored vegetables.

  Juan pulled the car up in front of one of the houses smack in the middle of a block. Gregor looked down at his own set of directions and double-checked the address was correct. Talk about the changes that had happened in the last thirty years. Gregor wondered how the man got out of his house to do his shopping. He wondered what happened to the house when it was empty because its occupant was away.

  Gregor got out of the car. He stopped by Juan’s window and said, “Wait here as long as it takes. If you have a problem with a meter reader, circle the block for a while and come back. I may be a long time.”

  Juan gave no indication that he’d heard or understood a thing. Gregor let it pass.

  Gregor went up the short walk, and then onto the stoop. There was a bell on the left side.

  Gregor tried leaning on the doorbell, but nothing happened. He couldn’t hear a sound from inside. The doorbell might be broken, or disconnected. Gregor opened the rickety screen door and pounded on the thicker, more substantial door behind it. When his fist banged against it, he realized the door was metal—and not hollow metal, either.

  Gregor pounded hard. Then he stopped and listened. A faint rustling sound came from inside, but it was not the sound of someone coming to open the door.

  Gregor waited for a few seconds and pounded again. When he stopped, there was again a faint rustling, but it was faster now. It sounded agitated.

  Gregor pounded a third time. Then he said, in as loud a voice as he could muster, “I’m not going away, Mr. Pearce. I’ll stand here on this doorstep for the rest of the day if I have to, and I won’t be quiet. I need you to open this door and talk to me, right this minute.”

  This time, there was no rustling sound from the other side of the door. Gregor could imagine Ray Guy Pearce somewhere inside there, holding his breath.

  “Mr. Pearce,” Gregor said, “not only can I stand here all day, but I’ve got no compunction about breaking in if I have to. Nothing I need from you is necessary in a trial. Nothing I get from you outside the law will do anything to compromise anyone’s case in any way. Open up.”

  There was still no sound behind the door. Gregor waited just long enough to be sure that Ray Guy Pearce wasn’t headed upstairs, and then he began pounding again.

  The door opened when Gregor was in mid-pound. It swung inward so fast, Gregor almost stumbled across the threshhold.

  The man on the other side of the door was not what Gregor had expected. He was not rabbity and small. He did not have eyes that darted from side to side as if they had a will of their own. Instead, he was large and hulking, as tall as Gregor himself and several times broader, but not with fat. He looked as if he spent several hours every day at the gym.

  Ray Guy Pearce looked directly into Gregor Demarkian’s eyes and didn’t blink. “You can’t pull your crap here,” he said. “I’m not one of the civilians who don’t know any better. Produce a search warrant or get out.”

  “I’m not going to produce a search warrant,” Gregor said, “because I don’t have one, and I wouldn’t bother to get one, because you and I both know there would be no point. But you are going to let me in, and you are going to talk to me, and you are going to do one more thing. And I think you even know what that is.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Ray Guy Pearce said.

  “No,” Gregor said. “I’m just in a position to get you arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder. I can even get you extradited to Connecticut. So first you’re going to let me in, and then you’re going to answer my questions, and then you’re either going to hand over that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or you’re going to tell me where I can get it.”

  2

  The house was not only Ray Guy Pearce’s home. It was the headquarters of Knight Sion Books, the “premier publisher of Truth on the planet.” Gregor saw a sign that said just that as soon as he stepped over the threshold. The sign also had a picture of Saint George and the Dragon on it, with Saint George meant to symbolize either Knight Sion, or Ray Guy Pearce himself.

  On second look, Gregor realized that the dragon was a little odd. It had seven heads, like a hydra, and seven eyes.

  Ray Guy closed the door behind Gregor’s back and then came around to glower. He did a very effective glower, but Gregor knew better than to take it seriously.

  “You have no right to enter a private house,” Ray Guy said. “If you think I’m one of the Sheeple, somebody who does not know my rights under the Constitution of the United States, you’re going to find that you’re very much mistaken.”

  Sheeple, Gregor thought.

  There were tables and couches and chairs all around them, and all of them were covered with books and papers. It was as if somebody had exploded a library. Gregor went over to the largest of the tables and put his attaché case down. Then he opened the attaché case up and took out the book he’d bought in Greenwich Village.

  “Let’s start by discussing this,” he said.

  Ray Guy came over and looked at the book. “Everybody is in a mad race to publish e-books,” he said, “but we know better. You can’t trust e-books. They’re wired into the central system. The authorities can reach right into them and delete anything they want. They can eliminate the book altogether. They can change passages. Once a hard copy is printed, thoug
h—well. It’s almost impossible to get rid of a hard copy.”

  Gregor opened the book to a spread in the middle and pointed to it. It contained a dozen snapshots of the Waring sisters at the beach, on a picnic, on the back terrace of their own house. Many of the pictures were so old, there were only three of the four Waring sisters in them, and the three in the pictures were all under ten.

  “See this?” Gregor said. “Do you know what this is?”

  “It’s the Waring family,” Ray Guy said blandly. “It’s a book about the Waring robbery case, so it’s hardly surprising there are pictures of the Waring family in it. Have pictures of the Waring family been declared subversive?”

  “This,” Gregor said, pointing again to the picture spread, “is a photo spread consisting of pictures that could have come from only one place: a Waring family photo album. There is no place else anybody could have gotten these. Somehow or the other, you got access to the Waring family photo albums.”

  “Maybe one of the sisters gave them to me,” Ray Guy said.

  “I’m sure one of the sisters did,” Gregor said. “Chapin Waring did. I do think you know where Chapin Waring has been, and I do think you’ve been protecting her all this time. But I looked you up on the Internet—”

  “The Internet is the tool of the authorities,” Ray Guy Pearce said. “The Internet gives the Sheeple the illusion that they have choice, and access, and information—”

  Gregor ran right over him. “I’ve looked you up on the Internet,” he said again, “and from what I’ve been able to figure out, you started publishing pictures like these within weeks of Chapin Waring’s disappearance. She couldn’t have gotten back into the house in Alwych to get them that early. Everybody was being much too careful.”

  “The authorities are powerful, but they have flaws,” Ray Guy Pearce said. “They’re too sure of themselves. They’re too convinced that they have everything under control. It’s what’s going to bring them down in the end.”

  “And that means,” Gregor said, “that you’ve been in that house. And given the increase in the available pictures over time, you’ve been in it more than once. The last time, a couple of days ago.”

  “A couple of days ago, I was where I always am. I was here, making sure the truth gets out in spite of what you people do to try to stop it.”

  Gregor gave Ray Guy Pearce a long look. Now that he’d had time to observe the man close up and over a little time, he could see that he hadn’t been so wrong in what he’d expected when he came here. The big, hulking, well-buffed physique was out of place, but the attitude was not. Behind the intimidating exterior was a man who was close to hysterical with fear and paranoia. Ray Guy kept his hands on his waist, but in the split seconds of the one or two times he removed them, Gregor could see that they were shaking. And physique or not, this was a relatively old man. He had to be at least sixty.

  “Here’s the thing,” Gregor said. “You run around, telling yourself that you’re some kind of genius at black ops, but the simple fact of the matter is that you’ve gotten away with what you’ve gotten away with for so long because nobody took you seriously. They would have if they’d known what you were actually doing, but they didn’t. In a way, I can hardly blame them. There are dozens of you people across the country. The agencies watch you more or less, just in case one of you goes crazy. But mostly you don’t, and mostly we don’t have to worry about you. But I’m not like the other Bureau people you’ve had to deal with so far. I spent the first third of my career on kidnapping detail.”

  “So that’s it,” Ray Guy said triumphantly. “Kidnapping. You’re going to try to frame me for kidnapping.”

  “Don’t be any more of an ass than you already are.”

  “An ass? Really? That’s what you’ve got? I know what you’re up to, and it won’t work. I know what you can do. I know what you can’t do. And I’m not a Sheeple.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “You’re a man who goes around saying that the United States is secretly a police state that inflicted the 9/11 disaster on itself in order to tighten the screws against its own people, that it’s being secretly run by the half-human descendants of Satan’s demons and human women in aid of bringing the reign of the Antichrist about as quickly as possible, and that it still, for some reason, is absolutely required to observe your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”

  “They can’t show their hand,” Ray Guy said. “If they show their hand, the people will know what’s going on and they’ll rise up in rebellion.”

  “They will?” Gregor said. “The Sheeple?”

  “The difference between the Sheeple and the Patriots is knowledge,” Ray Guy said.

  Gregor snapped the book shut. “You got those photographs by taking them out of photo albums in the Waring house yourself. It had to be you, because you act alone and Chapin Waring couldn’t have gone for them herself. Not for the earliest ones. You had both a key and the code to the security system, because Chapin Waring herself gave them to you. And she kept giving them to you, because she always had them. You never took any of those albums outright. Somebody might have realized they were missing. You opened them up and took individual pictures out of them. You got lucky that the Waring family was what it was. Nobody was going to go looking through old picture albums.”

  “The old lady did,” Ray Guy said. “Back in the first year or so. She told the FBI. The FBI came asking.”

  “And?”

  Ray Guy shrugged. “I know my rights,” he said. “I knew they couldn’t search without a warrant. It takes time to get a warrant. And there was nothing here. Because I didn’t take them.”

  “Of course you took them,” Gregor said. “And you took something else the other day when you broke in—except you don’t have to break in in the usual sense. My guess is that one of the things you do well is pick locks without leaving a trail. And I do take you seriously, Mr. Pearce. Unlike the rest of them, I know something about how people behave when they’re trying to both be in contact and not be in contact at the same time, when they have to give out information even though it would be safer not to. And I also know that if I insist they take you seriously, both the local police and the Bureau, they will find a connection to you from that break-in a couple of days ago. They will find it, and I’ll make sure they use it.”

  “I’m ready for persecution,” Ray Guy said. “I’ve been ready for persecution for years.”

  “Where did you hide Chapin Waring?”

  “I didn’t hide Chapin Waring,” Ray Guy said, “and don’t tell me I should have turned her in. I’m a private citizen. I’ve got no legal obligation to do any such thing. And I wouldn’t. I’m not going to make their work any easier for them.”

  “Where did you hide Chapin Waring?”

  “I didn’t hide her,” Ray Guy said again. “She didn’t even have to hide herself. She just moved into a neighborhood half a dozen blocks from here, dressed herself up in a hijab, and went about her business. A hijab, for Christ’s sake. Thirty years ago. There couldn’t have been more than five or ten thousand Muslims in all New York, and still all she needed to make herself invisible was a head scarf.”

  Gregor considered this. “It wouldn’t have made her invisible after 9/11,” he said.

  “Sure it would have,” Ray Guy said. “Everybody was running around so frantic that anything they did would look like some kind of anti-Muslim bigotry, she was safer after 9/11 than she was before it. Besides, your Bureau can’t find clover in a country meadow. She lived a perfectly normal life. She even went back to that silly town half a dozen times. People reported seeing her. Oh, I’ve been watching all of it. I really have. And the authorities have been useless.”

  “Which explains why they’re running the world and controlling the minds of the masses with such precision, nobody even notices,” Gregor said. “Where’s the money?”

  “I don’t have the money,” Ray Guy said. “And if you want to know, she didn’t have it, either.
My best guess is that there never was any money. There never were any bank robberies. Those were frames, setups to prevent the public from believing anything she said. After all, she was one of their own. She was a child of the very people who are running this world conspiracy, and she was ready to testify to all of it—to the infant sacrifices, to the devil worship, to the systematic rape of children to make them pliable agents of the powers that be—”

  “For God’s sake,” Gregor said.

  “I knew as soon as she showed up here that she was the greatest victory for right and truth and reason since I started this publishing company,” Ray Guy said. “I knew it and I knew that all the people at the top would know it, too. They got to her too early, though. If I’d been able to advise her, I could have kept her out of that kind of trouble. But even if she couldn’t testify directly, she could give me the information and I could get it on the record. And I have. And I will.”

  “Information about child sacrifice and Satan worship.”

  “Information about the powers that be.”

  “Why did she go back to Alwych?” Gregor asked.

  Ray Guy shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t live with her. I didn’t even see her all that often. It wasn’t safe. I think there was somebody there who was having trouble, somebody who wanted to come out and tell the truth, but who was too afraid.”

  “And who was that?”

  Ray Guy looked away, and in that instant, Gregor knew he was about to lie. “I never knew who it was,” he said. “But she needed a lot of encouragement, and Chapin went back every once in a while to encourage her. But it didn’t work. Chapin died without bringing her over.”

  Gregor filed this away in the back of his mind. It was not what he was here for, but there might be better ways of discovering what was going on with this than pounding at Ray Guy Pearce. Besides, it was impossible not to notice that Ray Guy was exhausted. He was much more exhausted than he should have been.

  Suddenly, the big man turned away, walked to the couch, and sat down on top of papers and books as if there were nothing there but a seat cushion.